Introduce Yourself!

Spanish, I was born and raised in El Salvador, Central America. High School in my country is only 2 years, the 10th grade and the 11th grade, 9th grade only counts as Junior High.

School there starts in February and finishes in October, so when I moved to the U.S. the school year was already half way, and because High School in U.S. is 4 years, I still did another one year and a half of High School when I moved, half of the 11th grade, and the whole senior year.

To give you a perspective, I end up going to 3 proms, one senior prom in El Salvador, then in U.S. I did the junior prom, and the senior prom once again. It was during that year and a half that I learned English. I went to High School in Rhode Island, in a town where I was the only Spanish speaking student, so I picked it up quickly because of that.

At first I would get headaches from listening people talk a language I pretty much did not understand, so I would go home to watch any Spanish soap opera I could find. I didn't like soap operas, but I just wanted to hear some Spanish. Sooner than later I got used to the new language, and I was finally able to move on from that.

This was the only hard part of High School, everything else like biology, math, physics, and chemistry were very easy because by the time I joined High School in U.S. I was already fluent on those subjects because I already had covered them in El Salvador. So I end up taking all the AP classes for those. When I graduated I was even featured in the newspaper because I did good in all of those courses, but it was almost cheating.

I did experience a heavy culture shock though. Parties were much crazier than anything I ever experienced in El Salvador, they involved strip poker, running away from cops for consuming alcohol, girls staying completely naked through out entire parties usually done on basements, all parties had happy endings, all dates had happy endings. I was simply not ready for all that, I eventually adapted, but I did feel the difference right from the beginning.

With all the talk about languages, I'm confident to tell you mates that I just started doing japanese classes! It's pretty awesome, and the spoken language isn't as hard as I thought (reading/writing certainly is). Wish me luck.

Maybe I'll finally play those untranslated jRPGs on my Saturn. Dragon Force 2, here I come!

The languages I really know are Norwegian and English, but in Norway we also have to have a third language which is either Spanish, German or French (I chose Spanish). The problem is nobody really learns their third language and now I can only remember really simple phrases. As for written languages; Norwegian has to written languages (they have very different words for just about all of them). that everyone has to learn.

Falcula18 Do you live in Massachusetts or Mexico?

Not that much incentive when your language is the most widely spoken in the world.

Cervantes Good luck.

stratogustav I've been considering a future overseas. I've read that Ecuador is a hidden gem for English teachers. Are there any other good places in Central or South America to teach English? (it's something I'm still chewing on).

In the US you technically don't have to (in most states, some require it), but most people do anyway --at least in my state. The usual go-to is Spanish since a lot people speak it here. I have to say though, I doubt most people could hold an intelligent conversation with it. Like centipede said, there isn't a lot of incentive. Even if someone plans to visit another country for a week or two, english is enough to get by in most cases. So more often than not actual good foreign language classes are reserved for the college level, required for certain fields only. 

@centipedide I would say Uruguay or Costa Rica, just because of the low levels of crime. It would not count as overseas though.